


Permanent Slumber

by Hinn_Raven



Series: Bitter Pill [7]
Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Future, Bad Future, Blindness, Gen, Grief/Mourning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-28
Updated: 2016-03-28
Packaged: 2018-05-29 14:58:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,131
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6380839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hinn_Raven/pseuds/Hinn_Raven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Summary: During the war, Tucker goes missing. Ten years later, he shows back up again. Chorus is on it’s last leg. His friends are either dead, captured or scattered. And Tucker is still Tucker.</p><p>This installment: Wash walks away from the resistance. He has very good reasons.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Permanent Slumber

**Author's Note:**

> Bitter Pill is back! :D Will I ever stop being mean to Wash? Nah.

Wash is still re-learning to fight, now that he’s blind. It’s so much harder; Carolina’s been trying to talk him out of it, trying to convince him to take a tactical role.

The idea is ridiculous, and Wash always dismisses it when she tries to bring it up. The others are reluctant to talk about it; it’s like everything else they’ve lost, skirting around it with a terror, as if he’ll fall to pieces the minute one of them mentions anything to do with eyes or sight or seeing. Wash hates it all. He’s not fragile. He survived. He’s luckier than most; why don’t they see that?

He’s luckier than Tucker. Felix had gotten bored and left him for dead. And that had given Carolina time to find him, and bring him to Doctor Grey, and that made all the difference. He had _lived_. He is blind, but he is _alive_.

Wash hadn’t found Tucker. He’d failed him.

He still isn’t sure if he believes Felix, about killing Tucker like he tried to kill Wash. Sometimes he does. When he dreams, he sees it.

It’s the only time he sees anything, anymore.

Wash wishes his brain would give him a break, sometimes. Give him happy memories. Not that he has many of those. But anything would be better than seeing Felix kill Tucker, over and over again. Especially when he can’t even see his friends’ faces anymore.

But still. He’s luckier than most. And he knows it deep in his bones.

Today he’s fighting on the front lines. Carolina doesn’t know; he’s still, technically speaking, supposed to be confined to headquarters. Grey is working with him on some sort of tech that should help him tell friend from foe.

He doesn’t need it. He’ll know an enemy when they try to kill him.

“Sir!” A soldier whose name he doesn’t know is near him. “Sir, you really shouldn’t be out here!”

“Like hell I’m not!” Wash already has killed several Charon soldiers. He might be useless with guns now, but he has his knives. And Felix is rumored to be making an appearance today.

He’s going to kill Felix if it’s the last thing he does. The scar that he has never seen but he can feel every time he runs his hands across his face twinges slightly, as if in anticipation.

Wash is going to make Felix pay for everything; for these five, long, miserable years, for Tucker, for his eye. For the soldier next to him, who goes down with a bullet in his head and a scream.

Wash grits his teeth and keeps going.

It’s been five years of hell. He tells himself that they’ll make them all pay: Hargrove, Felix, every other crony and conspirator that might lurk in the shadows, profiting from all this. They’ll win. They’ll make them pay. They have too—they’ve lost too much for it all to go down in flames now.

They’ll all pay, Wash thinks grimly, pulling his knife out of the chest of a pirate. He knows they will; knows it deep in his bones, a need for vengeance that he thought he’d left behind all those years ago, when the reds and blues had given him cobalt armor with yellow stripes, and given him a home. But now he knew it again, and the taste was bitter and cruel.

Suddenly, he heard a flicker over the radio. And not just any radio—that was an old radio channel, one that he hadn’t touched in years.

The old Blue Team channel. He frowned. Caboose was the only one who could activate the radio, and why would he—

“ _Church! You’re back. They told me you were gone and Carolina was sad, but you’re back now, you’re back, and oh, everyone will be so excited to see you!_ ”

Fear stops Wash dead in his tracks. Felix had ripped Epsilon right out of Carolina’s head. Ripped him out, and they hadn’t heard from him sense, and how could he just be here, in the middle of a battle field?

Everything about this screams trap; it’s a trick of some sort, it has to be. Felix knows all about Caboose, must have realized that they can lure Caboose in like this.

“Caboose!” He yells, activating his tracker to find the blue soldier. Doctor Grey and Simmons have already made his helmet completely usable, despite his blindness, and he has a path to Caboose in an instant. “Cover me!” He yells at the confused soldiers around him, and then he _runs_.

He’s too late.

“ _Church?_ ”

There is gunfire. Wash knows the sound of gunfire possibly better than the sound of his own voice, these days. He knows all the sounds of war. He knows the sound that bullets make when they shred through armor, because the target is close, probably reaching out, maybe hoping for an embrace that would never come. He knows the sound of a body hitting the ground.

He knows the sound of his own screaming as he nearly falls over Caboose’s prone form on the ground.

He doesn’t hear whoever shot Caboose. There are bodies everywhere; maybe one of the people on the rebels’ side shot them. Maybe they ran away.

His helmet tells him that Caboose is already dead.

He stays with the body until Grif and Simmons come for them both.

“Wash,” Simmons says, and Wash hears the grief in his voice, and something inside of him snaps.

Wash stands up.

_“Why are you guys helping me?”_

_“You helped us, Wash. It only makes sense.”_

_“Yeah, plus we need to even the teams. And I couldn't put up with Caboose constantly asking "can we keep him? Can we keep him?””_

_“For whatever it's worth... Thanks.”_

They’d given him Epsilon’s armor, and they’d made him their leader. Blue Team had opened their arms to him, and he’d failed them. Tucker is dead, has been dead for five long years, even if Wash had kept hope alive for so much longer, had believed until Felix had laughed and shown them the sword.

And now Caboose is dead.

And Wash is still alive, at the end of it.

He’s called himself lucky, in the past. He’s survived. He keeps living, and the others die instead. _Caboose. Tucker. Maine. Texas. South. North. York. Connie._

Maybe he’s cursed, maybe it’s just the worst luck in the galaxy.

But he won’t listen to any of the others die.

“Wash?” Grif asks. “Where the fuck are you going?”

Wash just keeps walking, ignoring the two reds calling after him. Ignores the pings on his radio that is Carolina trying to call him.

He’ll figure the rest out later.

Right now, he just needs to put as much distance as possible between him and the rest.

**Author's Note:**

> Curious about what killed Caboose? Be sure to check out Iz's "Criminal Tongues" in this universe, which explains a bit more.


End file.
